Free Will (On Intellectual Integrity)

Of all things, the concept of free will seems pretty immune to doubt. As with the question “are we conscious?”, the notion of free will is felt so deeply that we recoil with incredulity should anyone ever dare to doubt it. But if pressed, most of us can offer no more than a variant on the theme, “Well, I feel as if I have free will.”

Strangely, most think that this clinches the argument in their favour. Whenever I hear this, I am always somehow reminded of a fictional scene with a man (I imagine in the 1700s) stamping his foot in frustration and protesting, “Well of course the earth isn’t moving!!!” Like his modern contemporaries, this mythical intellectual would have been baffled by our insistence that the earth was actually in orbit. But, tellingly, he would not have been able to topple our modern (contrary) argument of the basis of evidence or logic.

Fortunately for us, the way things seem has no necessary bearing on how they actually are. Imagine if they did – imagine if our belief that people should fall out of rollercoasters when they were upside down actually caused that to happen! At school, we have to be coaxed into accepting the centrifugal ‘force’ as the correct expectation, though we are fought all the way by our intuitions. In a similar vein, it is tough to accept the idea that weight is irrelevant in determining which of two dropped objects will hit the floor first. Time and time again, we intuitively reach for the heavier one when asked this question. But it would be foolish to cling to this belief after one had been shown otherwise by logic or experiment.

Examples like these could be multiplied to infinity. With any luck though, they have sufficed to illustrate that the way things appear bears no necessary relation to reality, though it (hopefully!) often corresponds to a high enough degree. We tend to proceed in life on our assumptions, and this is on the whole justified. But we all accept deep down that evidence and logic are trump cards to groundless assumptions. How many stomachs does a cow have? We may think that, like us, “one” would guarantee correctness. But enough evidence of “four” (one might be satisfied by a textbook, say, or a dissection) should always push our guess aside if we are sane.

So with this in mind, let us return to the idea of free will again. We ‘all’ think we have it, not so? Well, then it may surprise you to know that law of ‘cause and effect’, or causality, forbids it. I’ll say it again – the law of ‘cause and effect’ forbids free will.

That certain things can cause other things to happen seems obvious. The pen fell to the ground (effect) because I pushed it off the table (cause). Consider it carefully, and you will see that virtually every explanation questions starting with “why” uses the notion of cause and effect, or ‘causality’. Even human emotions are apparently subject to it:
“Why is the girl sad?” [effect]
“Because her balloon popped.” [cause]

Causality is a common sense deduction from observations about the nature of things. All of us are familiar (even if we don’t phrase it this way) with the fact that the universe seems to follow certain laws. I mean ‘laws’ in the sense that they are descriptions (not prescriptions, as in our legal system) of regularities within nature, which do not seem to be violated. The universe does not seem to vary capriciously and maliciously. For example, if an apple is ‘severed from its arboreal connection’, its conduct thereafter always obeys the approximate description entailed in Newton’s law of gravity, unless it is acted on by other forces (themselves subject to their own laws). It is almost as if the apple has no option but to accelerate towards the centre of the earth at the rate of 9.8 metres per second per second. The apple never goes upwards on gravity’s account. The idea of nature’s regularity is what the majority of science is based on. In a sense, science’s goal is to uncover nature’s laws – laws which are only possible because of the uniformity of nature.

The understanding that nature seemed to work in a particular way, and not in other ways, gave birth to the idea which we now call ‘determinism’. That is, if the present state of affairs (the ‘present system’) and the laws that affect it are known, then the future state of affairs (the ‘future system’) should theoretically be calculable. For example, if I know that a car is constantly travelling at 100km/h in a northerly direction from me, then I can infallibly know that after half an hour it will be 50km due north from me. Interestingly enough, determinism does not depend on us knowing all the laws perfectly; it suffices that there are inviolable laws (even if undiscovered) for determinism to be logically inevitable.

But if determinism is true about future systems, then it follows that the present system must have been brought about because of some past system having been subject to the laws of nature. The apple being one metre above the grass is ‘because’ a fraction of a second ago it was one and half metres above the grass and gravity acted on it. (This may be an unusual answer to give, but it is nonetheless true – as true as taking the scene a little further back and giving the conventional answer of its stalk becoming separate from the tree.) Thus, the present (i.e. ‘effect’) was caused by the past, and that past was caused by a more distant past, and so on.

And if this is true of events generally, then it must be true of things like mental states or decisions too. Like the apple, my writing this essay must have been caused by something (even if I don’t know it) – which is just another way of saying that it is the consequence of the combination of some prior state and natural laws. But this prior state itself must have been caused by some more distant state combined with natural laws. And so on, and so on once more. Thus the problem with free will is laid bare – if we follow the chain of cause and effect back far enough, eventually we must get to a state far backward enough in time to remove us from any responsibility. Nominally, we could set it at our birth, for to blame me for something in 1975 when I wasn’t yet even a thought in anyone’s mind (let alone physically around) would be absurd! Usually, however, the free will chain moves comfortably outside our personal control well before this point, but if it somehow doesn’t, it must (by logic) head off into a past for which we aren’t responsible.

Thus, if causality is preserved, we cannot have free will, as conventionally understood, because the cause of our actions/decisions/evaluations/etc. always starts outside our consciousness. I believe that it feels like we have free will because this is exactly what it would feel like when the causal chain happens to pass through our consciousness, but that is by the wayside.

The only remotely plausible retaliation to this death sentence for free will would be to deny causality. This might seem ridiculous, but it is no more ridiculous in principle than our abandoning of free will. Recalling our earlier doctrine that appearances don’t change reality (and thus that everything is open to some doubt), it would be hypocritical of us to sequester causality from scrutiny. Pleasingly for this notion, quantum physics, for example, does seems to indicate that at a subatomic level, things can actually have no cause – they just happen. Whether or not this wrecks determinism at a level any larger than this is doubtful, but let us assume that it does. Are we ‘free’ again?

As contrary to our common sense as this seems, this breakdown in causality eliminates ‘free will’ even more easily. If there were events in our brains (say) that weren’t caused by anything, they must be random. And if they are random, once more we can’t be held responsible.

So whether or not causality is correct, we can’t have free will! Notice that appealing to things as mythical as ‘souls’ doesn’t help one bit – the same questions can be brought to bear on how the souls ‘choose’ their actions. And if someone were to retaliate that souls are ‘not bound by causality’ or any other such nonsense, then quite apart from doubts as to either his or her intelligence or sanity, their argument would be fatally exposed. This is because what our hypothetical unfortunate must postulate is some sequence of events in which the components are both non-linked (i.e. non-causal) and linked (i.e. non-random). Not only is this logically impossible, but, needless to say, no such thing has ever been seen. I’ll repeat that – not only is it as crazy as describing something as both black and non-black, but there is absolutely no evidence that such a thing exists.

The only response I’ve ever had to this is the comment, usually with the sort of deer-in-the-headlights expression, is “But then there is no room for blame.” Quite right, and the scandal that we persist in our superstition long after we have trashed it is quite baffling. But the person who makes this objection usually seems to think that this is a point against the logic described above. I find this misconception so difficult to conceive of that it took me a long time to understand it. The implications of the truth can never count against its validity. It is really as pathetic as thinking that the earth must be flat because otherwise our security would be in peril, for we could be attacked by navies coming from over the horizon as well!

One final word on the matter. No matter how inconceivable, there always remains the philosophical possibility of error in any statement about the outside world. It is possible, though I cannot envisage how, that it is possible that the above isn’t completely logically binding. But I don’t need to prove absolute truth in order to show that ‘free will’ is irrational. I can’t prove strictly, to the nth degree, that the toast I am about to eat isn’t actually a secretly-disguised poison made by Martians either. But I don’t need to. All I need to do is to show that the likelihood of this is less than the likelihood that it is, well, plain old toast. Nothing in our lives can be proved, nor disproved, to the perfect degree, but some things are definitely more likely than others to be true. We would well be considered insane if we abandoned all reason and believed that the two options – toast or disguised Martian poison – were on an equal footing. And we would be committed to a mental asylum if we actually favoured the latter.
All I ask is that we do the same with concepts like free will. Then we can deal with the implications like adults afterwards.